The house on the ridge (and the custom toilet)

Dan grew up in Section 8 housing and then a double-wide on three acres down a country road outside Port Orchard. His best friend Ben’s family had a house with a view of the Olympic Mountains, and Dan, who describes himself as a B student then and now, spent enough sunsets there to decide he wanted a house with a view someday. A lofty goal for someone like me, he says.

Years later, living in Spokane, he and his wife Lisa would walk a street on a ridge above Airway Heights with sweeping views of the Palouse. Those houses never came up for sale.

The tip

Lisa was volunteering on the board of the neighborhood’s private community pool. She came home from a meeting and mentioned that someone on the board said Dave was going to sell his house. Who’s Dave? Dave owned a house on the ridge. Get me Dave’s number.

Dan called. The house was not on the market. He told Dave who he was, that he was a real estate investor but this would probably be his primary home, and twenty minutes later he and Lisa were standing inside it.

Dave

Dave was an engineer, six-foot-four, sixty-five, and in Dan’s taxonomy there are two kinds of engineers: the straight-arrow, ninety-degree-angle kind, and the Back to the Future Doc kind. Dave was Doc. He had designed and built the house himself in 1979 and, by Dan’s estimate, had not touched the inside since. He lived on a farm in Davenport now. The yard had not been tended in six or eight years.

It was also, underneath the 1970s, a beautifully built 5,400-square-foot house with the view Dan had wanted since he was a kid.

Dan asked for a price. Dave hemmed: he wanted to get it ready and put it on the market. Dan pointed out that the yard alone would take two months, and offered to buy it as-is and close in two weeks. Dave was not ready. Dan, who admits he gets driven when he has a goal, backed off.

Then came the tour of the master bath, where Dave insisted Dan would want to keep the custom low-profile toilet, and offered a demonstration. Dan declined. Several times.

Have money, will spend

Walking out, Dan could see Lisa calculating what the remodel would cost. He was past that; opportunities like this do not come often. He told Dave he was headed to the foreclosure auction on Friday, and that after the auction he would call: have a number ready, and if you are willing to sell, let’s shake hands.

Friday, the auction produced nothing. Dan called. Dave hemmed. Dan finally said: Dave, have money, will spend. Do you want to make money? Yes. What’s your price? Dave said it. Done. Dan was there in an hour with the paperwork.

Getting Dave out

The closing was on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, three-quarters of Dave’s belongings were still in the house, leaving one 1980s cargo van at a time on hour-long trips to Davenport. Demo crew scheduled for Thursday. By Friday morning Lisa, whom Dan describes as a very kind person, walked into the bathroom while he was shaving and issued instructions: rent the biggest U-Haul in town, back it into the driveway, hand Dave the keys, and give him two days.

He did. The helper Dave had hired looked at the truck and said, wow, you’re really serious. Yes, said Dan, because this is really my house now.

They took the house to the studs and did not find a single point of compromise in how Dave had built it.

The point

One house was sourced by Dan’s son. Another by his wife. That is what “off-market” means in practice: not a secret list, but a community of people who know what you are looking for and call when they hear something. It is the same network the DanCan Private Investor Network is built on.